International Blasphemy Day took place for the first time on September 30.
Naturally it had its own Facebook page, which announced that its purpose was
“to promote free speech and to stand up in a show of solidarity for the
freedom to challenge, criticize, and satirize religion without fear of
murder, litigation, or reprisal.”

And
satire there was.

The
Center for Inquiry (CFI), which selected the day to mark the fifth
anniversary of the publication of the Mohammed cartoons by the Danish
newspaper Jyllensposten, sponsored an exhibit in Washington by
“atheist agnostic” artist Dana Ellyn featuring paintings with titles like
“Jesus Does His Nails” and “Praying for a Hail Mary on Super Bowl Sunday.”

In
Los Angeles, CFI Hollywood displayed several blasphemous short subjects:
“Dear Father,” “Jesus Tells a Joke,” and “Timmy’s Wish.” In Toronto,
supporters were urged to take up the “Blasphemy Challenge” by uploading
their denials of faith to YouTube. Ken Peters of California won the online
Blasphemy Day slogan contest with “Faith is No Reason,” and was awarded a
CFI T-shirt and coffee mug.

But
Blasphemy Day was only the most widely covered expression of Atheism on the
March in 2009.

Taking a cue from England and Spain, billboards, buses, and subway stations
across America were festooned with localized ads such as, “A million New
Yorkers are good without God. Are you?” From California and Arizona to
Maryland andWest Virginia, local chapters of
the Coalition of Reason paid for billboards showing a blue sky with puffy
white clouds and the legend, “Don’t Believe in God? You are not alone.”

The
campaign took its cue from celebrated anti-religious intellectuals like
science writer Richard Dawkins, historian Susan Jacoby, biologist P.Z.
Myers, and—most notoriously—flame-throwing English ex-patriot journalist
Christopher Hitchens. (“I think religion should be treated with ridicule,
hatred and contempt, and I claim that right,” Hitchens told a capacity crowd
at the University of Toronto in October.)

“Most atheists I know don’t care for religion, obviously, but aren’t angry
about it.” Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher wrote August 14.
“Not so the true unbelievers—the Dawkinsons and their followers—who prove
that you don’t have to be religious to be a fundamentalist.”

For
the unbelievers, there were new churches as well as old to join. In an
October 19 post on the New York Times City Room blog, Jennifer 8. Lee
listed Flying Spaghetti Monster Meetup, New York City Brights, New York
Philosophy, the New York Society for Ethical Culture, Richie’s List, and the
Secular Humanist Society of New York, among others.

Online, Twitter provided a lively forum for atheist militants, who began
referring to themselves as “Tweathens.” A December 16 tweet from
BibleAlsoSays captured their spirit: “ALL Brands of Christianity can’t be
right, but they can ALL be wrong! In other words, they are ALL Baloney!”

The
new atheism did unsettle old atheists like former SUNY Buffalo philosophy
professor Paul Kurtz, who established CFI in 1991 to bring together his
Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for the Scientific
Investigation for Claims of the Paranormal.

In
promoting the gospel of free thought, CFI had taken a moderate line,
emphasizing toleration for unbelievers and a secular approach to government.
When CFI opened an office in Washington in 2006, Kurtz issued “In Defense of
Science and Secularism,” which asked politicians to “base public policy
insofar as possible on empirical evidence instead of religious faith…[to]
maintain a strict separation between church and state…[and to] protect and
promote scientific inquiry.”

But
last summer, Kurtz was overthrown as chairman of the organization in a
palace coup led by lawyer and bioethicist Ronald Lindsay. As President and
CEO, Lindsey shifted CFI into a higher gear.

“When we defended the right of a Danish newspaper to publish cartoons
deploring the violence of Muslim suicide bombers, we were supporting freedom
of the press,” Kurtz told the online Christian Post October 1.

“The
right to publish dissenting critiques of religion should be accepted as
basic to freedom of expression. But for CFI itself to sponsor the lampooning
of Christianity by encouraging anti-Catholic, anti-Protestant, or any other
anti-religious cartoons goes beyond the bounds of civilized discourse in
pluralistic society. It is not dissimilar to the anti-Semitic cartoons of
the Nazi era. Yet there are some fundamentalist atheists who have resorted
to such vulgar antics to gain press attention. In doing so they have
dishonored the basic ethical principles of what the Center for Inquiry has
resolutely stood for until now: the toleration of opposing viewpoints.”

Writing on his New American Mercury blog September 25, former CFI
senior vice president R. Joseph Hoffmann called Blasphemy Day a
“preposterous exercise in how to be religiously offensive.” It was “as
tactless as it is pointless. Pointless because when it’s over I still won’t
be able to buy wine after twilight in New York.”

For
his part, Lindsay told CNN’s Moni Basu September 30, “We think religious
beliefs should be subject to examination and criticism just as political
beliefs are.”

And
in a November 29 debate on the proposition “Atheism is the New
Fundamentalism,” sponsored by the British debating forum Intelligence
Squared, Dawkins vigorously asserted the negative. Atheists, he emphasized
on his website
(www.RichardDawkins.net)
the following day, have a commitment to exploring evidence and a readiness
to embrace change, but the passion of their arguments or their refusal to
remain silent should not be mistaken for fundamentalism.”

The
passion did provoke a bit of counter-revolution, as Daniel Burke of the
Religion News Service reported October 15: “The old atheists said there was
no God. The so-called ‘New Atheists’ said there was no God, and they were
vocally vicious about it. Now, the new ‘New Atheists’—call it Atheism
3.0—say there’s still no God, but maybe religion isn’t all that bad.”

P.Z.
Myers, who earned his place in the New Atheist pantheon by driving a rusty
nail through a communion wafer on YouTube, would have none of it. Atheism
3.0, he wrote on his blog Pharyngula December 8, is “atheism for
people who don’t like atheism, or who want to neuter atheism so it doesn’t
challenge a pious status quo…these guys seem to be more interested in hiding
the significance of the nonexistence of gods so they can hide behind a
façade of superficial religiosity, and appeal to a waffly, wishy-washy
middle ground.”

But
at the end of the day, Blasphemy Day (and its brethren media events) seemed
less about causing offense than about the social construction of a new
American atheist identity. For while, according to the 2008 Trinity American
Religious Identity survey, the proportion of Americans who do not identify
with a religion has doubled to 15 percent of the population since 1990,
admitted atheists constitute only .7 percent.

“I
think we’re in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago,”
Dawkins told Wired magazine in November 2006. “There was a need for
people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the
courage to come out. I think that’s the case with atheists.”

Interviewed on the Times’City Room June 25, Ken Bronstein,
the president of New York City Atheists, said, “I’ve had people call me in
tears, and tell me they thought they’d never see a sign promoting atheism in
New York.”

And
Ken Loukinen, founder of Florida Atheists and Secular Humanists, told the
Bismarck Tribune August 8, “If everybody who was atheist came out of the
closet, you’d see how many of us there really are.”